The first thirty days of a new SEO account

SEO gets sold as content. Month one is almost entirely not content. Here is what the first four weeks really look like, so you can judge whether what you are being given matches.

Week one: find out what is broken

A full crawl of the site, then the boring list. Pages returning errors, pages blocked from indexing by accident, duplicate versions of the same page competing with each other, missing titles, slow templates.

This stage routinely finds something significant. On this very site we found four old homepage drafts still published, still indexable and still being submitted to Google, quietly competing with the real one. That is not unusual. It is what happens when a site gets rebuilt and nothing gets retired.

Week two: work out what people actually search

Not what the business calls its services. What customers type. Those are rarely the same, and the gap is where most of the opportunity sits.

We map every commercial term to exactly one page. One term, one page. The moment two pages target the same term they compete, and Google picks, usually badly. Then we check what the top three competitors rank for that we do not.

Week three: fix the pages that already exist

Most sites have pages that could rank and do not, because the title says one thing, the heading says another and the body never uses the phrase a customer would type.

Rewriting titles, descriptions and headings on existing pages produces movement faster than any new article, because those pages already have history. We also add internal links, which is the cheapest ranking lever almost nobody uses. A page nothing links to is a page you are telling Google not to care about.

Week four: local, then the content plan

For a business serving a specific area, the Google Business Profile and the consistency of your name, address and phone across the web matter more than a blog. We cover why in why your shop is invisible on Google Maps.

Only then does the content plan get written, and it gets written against the keyword map from week two rather than against whatever seems interesting.

What to expect at day thirty

Technical issues fixed, a keyword map you can read, existing pages rewritten, internal linking in place, local profile sorted, and a content plan. What you will probably not have is a dramatic ranking change, because you are thirty days in.

Anyone promising rankings inside a month is either targeting terms nobody searches or telling you what you want to hear. This is how our SEO service actually starts.